.

Conceived and produced in the late 60s Columbo is the platonic ideal of the ‘inverted’ mystery where the killer is revealed early to the audience and the intrigue of the story is how the detective find the tiny flaw in an otherwise ‘perfect murder.’ It is unlikely that the movies and series had someone other than Peter Falk been cast as the disheveled but brilliant police detective. Falk often improvised lines on camera to throw off his costars in the same manner that his characters threw off balance the quarry he hunted.

In a bust of nostalgia, I decided to watch an episode from the early 1970s. Originally, I had planned on an episode where the guest star was the incomparable Ricardo Montalban but browsing through the available shows on Tubi I stumbled upon a season one episode with a stacked cast of Roddy McDowall, Ida Lupino, Anne Francis, James Gregory, and William Windom. Well, this one I had to watch.

McDowall, a brilliant chemist and photographer, plants a small explosive device in his Uncle’s cars which explodes killing the man on a dangerous mountain road where it might easily be mistaken as an accident.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the cast of Short Fuse this was actually a very substandard Columbo. There is actually very little for Columbo to detect and the character seemingly leaps to the correct solution without any evidentiary trail. The best part of any Columbo story, where the little detective reveals the flaw in the plan and the crucial elements that the brilliant upper-class murder missed is actually not present in this episode. Columbo plays a trick on McDowall’s character, causing him to panic and reveal knowledge he could have only if he had planted a bomb, but there is no ‘see, this is where you screwed up and I saw it,’ moment. In fact, it is highly unlikely that any grand jury would have returned with an indictment.

What a shame to see such a wonderful cast in such an inferior story.